By German Lopez
Oct 20, 2020, 10:00am EDT
Several months after his inauguration, President Donald Trump said the opioid epidemic would end under his watch. “Watch what happens, if we do our jobs, how the number of drug users and the addicted will start to tumble downward over a period of years,” he said in 2017. “It will be a beautiful thing to see.”
It’s similar to the kind of empty promise Trump made on Covid-19 — when he said it would disappear “like a miracle.” And just like the coronavirus, the opposite has happened: Under Trump, drug overdose deaths actually increased, even before the Covid-19 pandemic took off.
According to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug overdose deaths in 2019, before Covid-19, hit a record high of nearly 72,000, up almost 5 percent from 69,000 in 2018 and 11 percent from 65,000 in 2016, the year before Trump took office. The data for 2020 so far suggests the year will be even worse, due to problems caused by Covid-19 and the continued spread of fentanyl, a dangerous synthetic opioid, in illegal drug markets.
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The same structural problems that led to the opioid crisis and allowed it to fester remain. America still doesn’t support addiction treatment anywhere near enough. The treatment facilities that do exist often don’t follow the evidence on what works and are often frauds. Harm reduction services, like needle exchanges, remain underused. And there’s still too much opioid prescribing. For years, experts have called for a big investment — including health care reform and tens of billions of dollars — to fix these problems, but nothing from the federal government, including under Trump, has approached the scale warranted.
Despite rarely mentioning it on the campaign trail, Biden has a good plan to do something about drug addiction and overdoses, making a serious investment into treatment and harm reduction and cracking down on excess opioid prescriptions.
It’s also the kind of plan that could potentially pass with bipartisan support, with Republican leaders from states hit hard by drugs like Sens. Rob Portman (OH) and Shelley Moore Capito (WV) deeply interested in doing something about the issue.
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